Erzsebet Bathory gained immortal fame as one of the first female serial killers; known as the “Bloody Countess,” she was accused of brutally torturing and murdering over six-hundred young women. But was she really an unrepentant, psychopathic murderer—or simply a political obstacle to the king? Was she really bathing in the blood of her victims, or was she herself the victim of a witch hunt? Such questions haunt the pages of The Countess (Crown, 2010), Rebecca Johns’s lively historical novel, which reconstructs the complexity of this 17th century scandal and brings alive the woman behind the myth.

In her conversation with novelist Tracy Chevalier, Felicity Librie uncovers how research fuels the process of character development, how the past sheds light on our present moment, and why Chevalier will never tire of getting lost on a journey of discovery.

With the 2010 Man Booker Prize announcement just over a week away, let’s take a quick look back. The Booker is one of world’s top literary prizes, and Booker prize winners are regarded as highly influential books. So what effect did last year’s winner, Hilary Mantel’s wildly popular Wolf Hall, have?
First, [...]

Erika at Practicing Writing pointed us to this great post at The Guardian on real-life characters in fiction. Writes blogger Meg Rosoff:
Six hundred words were suggested to tackle the important question of whether it is “right and fair” to fictionalise real-life characters. I could answer it in 15.
Do what you like, only do it [...]

Over at The Outlet, Jim Shepard has a great essay on working with historical events in fiction:
Writers shouldn’t lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility. And that they should take heart from that chutzpah, as well. The whole project of literature – the [...]

In both of the recent New York Times reviews of E.L. Doctorow’s new novel, Homer & Langley, which is based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, the reviewers go out of their way to point to other works drawn from the lives of these eccentric, hoarding bachelor shut-ins: Marcia Davenport’s My Brother’s Keeper, Richard Greenberg’s The Dazzle, Franz Lidz’s Ghosty Men: The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York’s Greatest Hoarders, and a variety of other books, films, plays, and TV shows. In short: we are obsessed with the obsessed. Nowhere is this clearer than in Matt Bell’s The Collectors, which is also based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, and deserves to be added to this canon.

Toward the end of the conference, I was seriously overstimulated and running on an average of 5 hours of sleep per night. But the title alone of Maud Casey’s lecture, “The Secret History: The Power of Imagined Figures in Historical Fiction,” lured me out of bed that very last morning. Although I haven’t [...]

It’s 1947. You’re a 15-year-old girl with a movie-star gorgeous mother and a stepfather just back from World War II. Do you know what your parents are up to?

Steve Amick’s superb second novel, Nothing But a Smile (Pantheon, 2009), opens in June of 1944, with Winton (“Wink”) S. Dutton, a promising young cartoonist in civilian life, walking the streets of Chicago. Wink is home from the war early, his drawing hand having been mangled when, hung-over while doing an assignment for Yank Magazine, he misheard an ensign’s instructions and touched a submarine flywheel that he should have simply drawn. But prior to shipping back home, Wink had promised his buddy, Bill (“Chesty”) Chesterton, to look up his wife, Sal, in Chicago, so he might tell her how faithful Chesty has been to her, and how much he loves her. And right away, Amick has readers worrying over their meeting; the bleached bones of an affair have been set out in a row…